On March 22, the US intelligence agency, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), announced the awarding of commercial hyperspectral study contracts to six geospatial companies. The contracts are part of NRO’s Strategic Commercial Enhancement Broad Agency Announcement (SCE-BAA) initiative aimed at tapping capacities developed in the commercial space sector for NRO’s various imagery intelligence, signals intelligence and measurement and signals intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance objectives. These six NRO-awarded companies are – Xplore (Washington), Planet (California), Pixxel (California), HyperSat (Delaware), Orbital Sidekick (California), and BlackSky Technology (Virginia). Of these six, Pixxel is the only company that emerged outside the US, in Bengaluru,…
Author: Chaitanya Giri
Chaitanya Giri
Prof. Chaitanya Giri is the Editor of Interstellar News. He is an internationally-renowned and award-winning space scientist, an astrochemist, to be precise, with experience working on interplanetary space missions in Europe, Japan and the US. His professional interests span space policy analyses, emerging techno-geostrategy and ethics, space economy, and science-tech diplomacy. He consults various agencies, is affiliated with various national and international institutions and think tanks, and is an Associate Professor at FLAME University in Pune. He is confidently stoked about the path ahead for Interstellar.
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